Brahmacharya: Life's Balancing Act

Brahmacharya, or Nonexcess, is the fourth of the Yamas. (Learn about the Yamas, the first of the Eight Limbs of Yoga, in my previous blog post: Grow your Yoga Practice by Understanding the Eight Limbs of Yoga). The literal translation of Brahmacharya is "conduct consistent with Brahma," so in essence Brahmacharya means conduct consistent with God.

Brahma is the first god of the Hindu triumvirate. The three gods that make up the Hindu triumvirate consist of: Brahma (the creator of the universe), Vishnu (the preserver of the universe), and Shiva (the destroyer to allow for new creation). While we won't spend time diving into the Hindu religion as part of this blog post, it is important to understand the origin of the word to truly comprehend its meaning and all it encompasses. Without this understanding we might take a narrower view of what Brahmacharya means. For instance, some in the western world equate Brahmacharya to mean only celibacy or abstinence; however Brahmacharya is much more than the practice of nonexcess as it relates to sex.

Brahmacharya guides us to find awareness and appreciation of all that is holy and sacred in life. To do so, we must approach our world with an innate understanding of what is enough. The act of overindulgence, whether in food, drink, sex, work, etc., causes us to lose our connection to a how something makes us feel. If we can no longer understand how and what we feel, how can we honor ourselves and our bodies and treat ourselves as sacred? And if we can't treat ourselves as scared, how will be able to find awareness and appreciation of all that is holy and scared in the world around us?

As I think about my own life and my practice of Brahmacharya, I am forced to realize that this is yet another one of the yamas that I personally struggle with. I've been told by family, friends, and coworkers that I have a tendency to over commit or go after a job, a task, a hobby with so much vigor that they are afraid that I'm going to burn out. As much as I don't want to admit it, I've definitely been known to burn out because of how I've approached my life in the past. I remember going through a period in my life where I had over committed and was overindulging myself in my work. I was so focused on working that I had lost sight of other important things in life such as sleeping, eating, exercising, and spending time with friends and family. While I didn't realize it at the time, I had lost touch with reality, lost touch with myself, and had stopped asking myself how I felt each day.

One day, my father, seeing the toll that my overindulgence in work was taking on, sat me down to talk about the importance of balance or nonexcess in my life. He used a brilliantly simple metaphor to explain how I should think about balance in my life. He explained that I should think about my life as a chair and that each leg of the chair was an important aspect of my life. For example, the first leg could represent work or career, the second leg friends and family, the third leg self-care (health and wellness), and the fourth hobbies or other meaningful tasks in life. The idea was that if I leaned too far into one leg by overindulging, the chair would tip over. What I didn't realize is that this conversation was his way of helping me catch myself before my own chair tipped over.

This is the conversation that spurred this blog and my focus on interpreting what balance means to me. While some days my chair wobbles one direction and other days it wobbles in another direction, I always find myself aspiring to keep all four legs of my life chair of the floor. On days when my chair sits stable, I am most at ease with myself. On these days I feel the most alive because I am able to understand exactly what I need and how I feel - I am able to honor myself as sacred.

I want to take a moment of gratitude to say thank you to my father for helping me start my practice of Brahmacharya and for helping me begin my journey to finding and interpreting balance.

With that, I bow my head and say, Namaste.